Saturday, 20 December 2014

I haven't been keeping up with this blog very well lately, but here is a piece I've just done for the Guardian about five key moments of Christmas TV. Merry Christmas.

On
Christmas night 1937, the BBC television studios at Alexandra Palace on London’s
northern heights were shrouded in freezing smog. When the Music Hall Cavalcade
finished at 10pm, viewers were so concerned for the performers that they rang up
the studios offering them lifts home. That Christmas, a year after television
broadcasts had begun, showed that the few thousand people with TV sets were
forging an intimate relationship with the new medium. Hundreds of them sent
cards to the studios or rang up to wish the artistes a happy Christmas. The idea
of a special festive schedule was taking shape, with an adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland, a Christmas Cabaret and “Television’s First Grand Christmas
Pantomime: Dick Whittington and His Cat”. But Lord Reith was still in charge,
so there was no television on Boxing Day - a Sunday.

Our modern
idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas
and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered,
intangible national community, gathered in 20 million living rooms. Just as
Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all
faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary
commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society
of viewers. Recalling the Christmas television of the past is an evocative but
slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie
and fake snow, a lot of it filmed under baking studio lights in August, has
been deployed over the last seventy-odd years to convince us that at this time
of year we have something in common.

The
Queen’s first television broadcast, 1957

At 3pm on
Christmas Day 1957, the screens of about 6 million televisions dissolved to
reveal the Queen in the long library at Sandringham, with pictures of her
children on her desk. A reluctant performer who did not even like the cameras
settling on her face during Trooping the Colour, she had agreed to have her
Christmas broadcast televised for the first time. Having refused the aid of the
recently invented teleprompter, she delivered her lines from a clearly visible script.
Many viewers at home stood to attention for the duration of her speech, as they
had done since her grandfather delivered the first Christmas radio broadcast 25
years earlier.

“My own
family often gather round to watch television as they are this moment, and that
is how I imagine you now,” the Queen said to a microphone hidden in a sprig of
holly. “I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message
more personal and direct.” But she also expressed concern about “the speed at
which things are changing all around us” and about “unthinking people who
carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery”.

That
August, John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham, had published an article in the National
and English Review which criticised the Queen’s “tweedy” advisers who, for fear
of destroying her mystique, had ensured her speeches were “prim little sermons”
delivered in the manner of “a priggish schoolgirl”. Grigg argued that, in a modern
democracy, the monarchy needed to adapt “to perform the seemingly impossible
task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary”. The Queen’s television
broadcast was both a rejoinder to Grigg and a concession that he may have had a
point.

Members of
the BBC’s audience research panel said that it was “a real thrill to see the
Queen so clearly and so close” and that it had made them feel as if “she is
really our friend and not a removed figure”. Other viewers had different
priorities. The BBC’s telephone duty log recorded hundreds of complaints after
the failure of outside broadcast equipment meant that the programme scheduled straight
after the Queen, Billy Smart’s Family Party from Windsor, had to be abandoned and
replaced by a Ronald Colman film, followed by light songs from Elton Hayes. A BBC
spokesman said the Windsor area was “difficult to transmit from”.

Apollo 8
interrupts the festive schedules, 1968

Christmas
television’s strangest quality is its juxtaposition of sacrality and banality, solemnity
and froth. This contrast was unusually jarring over Christmas 1968, when the
schedules were interrupted by the crew of Apollo 8 presenting 20-minute
broadcasts daily at about 1.30pm British time. The first, on 22 December,
showed the astronaut Neil Anders clowning around with a toothbrush, turning
weightlessness into a party game for the first time in history, and the first-ever
glimpse of the earth from interplanetary space, as James Lovell pointed his
camera out of the cabin window. Sadly, the telephoto lens failed to work and
the earth on TV looked like a tiny blob of light, resembling a distant bicycle
headlight on a road at night.

The next
day, however, the camera was working and viewers could clearly see the earth
from 175,000 miles away. Britain was covered in cloud. The Cambridge cultural
critic Raymond Williams declared it “a new way of seeing” and compared it to
the revolving earth that BBC1 used as its channel ident. He saw “the north and
west in ragged shadow; the bright Caribbean; the atlas shapes of the Americas …
I glanced from its memory to the spinning globe of BBC-1 presentation: light,
untextured, slightly oiled. It was necessary to remember that both were
television.”

Apollo 8
reached the moon on Christmas Eve, and seasonal specials like Cilla and Sooty’s
Christmas Party were interrupted by ticker-tape summaries, moving across the
bottom of the screen, informing viewers where the spacecraft was. While Patrick
Moore was commenting on the most perilous moment in the mission, the “critical
burn” when the astronauts had to fire the lunar module’s rocket to lock them
into a closed orbit round the moon, the BBC interrupted him to go to Christmas Jackanory.

As the
astronauts orbited the moon, viewers heard them read out the opening verses of
Genesis, before mission commander Frank Borman signed off with “good night,
good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good
Earth”. As with the best Christmas television, those modern-day Magi, the three
lunar astronauts, had managed to land just the right side of schmaltz.

Morecambe
and Wise unite the nation, 1977

At 8.55pm
on Christmas night 1977, according to the BBC’s own figures, 28.5 million people
sat down for an hour and ten minutes and watched the Morecambe and Wise
Christmas Show. Audience statistics at the time were much disputed, and ITV’s ratings
system had Morecambe and Wise beaten that night by Mike Yarwood. But their 1977
show has still entered folk memory as the culmination of television’s potential
to bring the nation together. The following year, updating his father J.A.R.
Pimlott’s book The Englishman’s Christmas, Ben Pimlott wrote that “for those who
digest their mid-day Christmas dinner in an armchair, the Christmas edition of
the Morecambe and Wise show has established itself as an essential part of the
Festival”.

This level
of expectation came at a cost to the key participants. Eric Morecambe was so
full of fear-induced adrenalin before the Christmas show that he came out in
sties and got a nervous itch in his ear. The show took Eddie Braben five weeks
to write, working 16-hour days, pushing himself close to nervous exhaustion. When
he watched it on Christmas day, his whole body was clenched with tension,
unplacated by the studio audience laughter.

Not
everyone at the time considered the 1977 show a classic: Clive James in the Observer
thought Morecambe had been funnier ad libbing with Dickie Davies on World of
Sport on Christmas Eve. But then, as our last link with vaudeville, Morecambe
and Wise’s act had always relied on comforting familiarity and repetition. “They
do not so much deliver their lines, as resuscitate them,” said an admiring
Dennis Potter in the Sunday Times.

It helped
that, after the IMF crisis at the end of 1976, Christmas 1977 was a time of
modest optimism: the pound was recovering, inflation was down and wages rising
modestly. It was also the high watermark of three-channel terrestrial television.
After spreading slowly across the country for 40 years, the transmitters now reached
almost everywhere, with 99.5% of the population able to receive BBC1 and the
majority of homes now having a colour TV – more, in fact, than had a telephone.
The Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, formerly a television refusenik, wrote in his
Orcadian column of his relief at getting hold of the Radio Times Christmas
issue after the Stromness paper shop had sold out and he faced “a bleak
prospect of groping blindly about in a fog of programmes for a fortnight”. Now he
could sit in front of the TV and let his mind be “fed full of shadows”.

Men
Behaving Badly at Christmas, 1998

At the end
of 1998, Britain was entering the age of digital television. Sky had just
launched a digital service of nearly 200 channels, and a BBC advert for its new
digital channels had Stephen Fry sat at the dinner table asking his television
to “pass the salt please, darling”. In place of a community of viewers, the
digital age promised a profusion of personal choice. The outgoing BBC director-general,
John Birt, predicted that “broadcasting will one day no longer be a shared
cultural experience”.

The
Christmas schedules reflected this sense of the ending of an era. BBC1’s Christmas
night consisted of Changing Rooms at Christmas, an episode of Men Behaving
Badly in which Gary attempted to cure his impotence by masturbating over his
collection of porn magazines, and the comedy sports quiz They Think It's All
Over. The evening’s TV seemed to reflect a nation in love with lifestyle fads
and new-lad banter and suspicious of earnestness and tradition. In the Daily
Mail, the novelist Malcolm Bradbury worried that in “an age of easy sensations,
soft scandals, featureless celebrities … the hope that a family can gather
around a TV set to share a common programme and the spirit of the season is
probably dying. Maybe this disappointing TV Christmas is nothing less than the
spirit of Christmases to come.”

At the end
of 1998, Graham McCann had published an acclaimed biography of Morecambe and
Wise, which began with a setpiece about the 1977 Christmas Show as a vanished
moment of national unity. On Christmas day afternoon, BBC1 reran Morecambe and
Wise’s Christmas 1973 show – the one with André Previn conducting Eric playing
Grieg’s piano concerto, much fresher and funnier than 1977 - to remind viewers
of what they had lost.

The survival
of the TV Christmas, 2014

By 2014, though,
it was clear that rumours about the death of the television Christmas had been exaggerated.
The season began in mid-November with the Christmas TV adverts for John Lewis
and Sainsbury’s being dissected by everyone in search of signs and portents. Then,
in early December, there was the time-honoured tradition of the Christmas
schedules being announced to the ritualistic lament from the tabloids and the Taxpayers’
Alliance about the BBC fobbing us off with repeats.

Communal
viewing had turned out to be more resilient than people had feared at the start
of the digital era. These people had overestimated the desire of viewers to
become active consumers, forever searching catch-up services and the higher
numbers of the remote control for “content”. Instead, and especially at
Christmas, they were slothful and habit-loving. They wanted to flop passive-aggressively
in front of the set, moaning about there being nothing on except Through the
Christmas Keyhole or the Come Dine With Me Christmas Special – and then watching
them anyway.

There was still
plenty of family entertainment: Harry Hill as Professor Branestawm, Chummy and
Trixie helping with the Sunday School Christmas Concert in Call The Midwife and
Strictly Come Dancing welcoming back Bruce Forsyth, a man who had first
appeared on television aged 11 in 1939. Although religious ceremony was now mostly
banished from the TV, we still had the white magic and quasi-mysticism of Doctor
Who, with the Doctor and Clara trapped on an Arctic base with Father Christmas.

Christmas television
has long had this incantatory quality, this rhetorical conjuring up of a collective
national life. Perhaps its imagined community of viewers has always been
imaginary and TV only ever offers what Dennis Potter called “the flickering
illusion of communality”. Or perhaps that fragile sense of togetherness becomes
half-real simply by being invoked.

Those
watching in 2014 would certainly still have recognised the Christmas night
routine of the playwright Peter Nichols, who spent the evening in 1969 with his
extended family crammed into the tiny living room of his in-laws’ semi-detached
in Bristol. “Back in the roomful of furniture and family, we sit watching
Petula Clark singing ‘Holy Night’,” he wrote in his diary. “Val Doonican
crooning a lullaby to Wendy Craig, the Young Generation dancing the life of
Jesus. The children are shouted at every time they block an adult’s view. They
want to play with the toys they’ve been given, not grasping that the important
part, the giving, is over for another year and they should sit like grateful
mutes and let us watch our favourite stars.”

Sunday, 21 September 2014

I
have an essay on the paper clip in Grace Lees-Maffei’s edited collection Iconic
Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things, which is published this week by Bloomsbury.
Here is a very brief extract:

‘If
all that survives of our fatally flawed civilization is the humble paper clip,
archaeologists from some galaxy far, far away may give us more credit than we
deserve,’ the design critic Owen Edwards argues in his book Elegant Solutions. ‘In
our vast catalog of material innovation, no more perfectly conceived object
exists.’ The double oval shape of a paper clip is instantly recognisable. The way that it turns in on itself with its three hair-pin bends and rounded
top and bottom - in France paper clips are known as ‘trombones’ - seems like
the perfect marriage of form and function. Cheap and easy to reproduce, paper clips have
remained virtually the same for over a hundred years. Despite the odd variation
- coloured paper clips with plastic coatings, square-edged rather than rounded
ones, jumbo clips with corrugated finishes, avant-garde versions with a ‘v’
replacing the inner curve – the design of the classic paper clip remains
unchallenged. With the gentle, sliding action of a paper clip we
bring paper, and some small element of our lives, under control.

The mass-produced paper clip as we know it dates
back to the late 19th century, when the first machines emerged that could bend
and cut steel wire cheaply and cleanly. For the modern paper clip is based on
the theory of elasticity or springiness, as elaborated as early as 1678 by the
physicist Robert Hooke in his Lectures de potentia restitutiva. Hooke’s law, Ut tensio sic uis, or ‘as is the extension so is the force’,
means that the extension of a spring, or the displacement from its original
position, is directly proportional to the force applied. The spring-steel wire of a paper
clip is easily bendable but also wants to revert to its original shape
(provided it is not bent too dramatically), allowing it to glide over papers easily
and to fasten them reasonably securely …

A
paper clip on its own has virtually no monetary or aesthetic value, which is
why so many remain forever unused, absent-mindedly
vacuumed up by cleaners or twisted into a useless elongated wire by bored
office workers. The phrase ‘minister for paper clips’ is used in British
political life to describe a job of no importance, usually in the Cabinet
office. In July 2005, a 26-year-old Canadian, Kyle
McDonald, announced that he was embarking on a quest to trade a single red
paper clip for a house. Advertising this almost worthless piece of stationery
on the internet, he succeeded in swapping it for a succession of bigger and better
things until nine months and only ten trades later (including a doorknob, a
party pack of beer and a snowmobile), he was the owner of a one-bedroom
bungalow in Phoenix, Colorado …

The
history and design of the paper clip is much messier and more nuanced than what
is usually implied by the increasingly casual use of the word ‘iconic’. As the
design historian Henry Petroski argues in The Evolution of Useful Things, it is
nowhere near as perfectly functional an object as it at first appears. Paper clips
are at best an elegant compromise between loose leafs and the stapler: their
grip on the paper can be too firm (they can dig into the top page and leave
scratches) but also too loose (they have a tendency to slide off, particularly
when placed in piles with other paper-clipped documents). And this is perhaps
the best evidence of the paper clip’s iconicity, that it has a reputation for
design flawlessness it does not deserve. As Petroski puts it, ‘its grip on the
minds of critics is no doubt more secure than its grip on their manuscripts’.

Saturday, 30 August 2014

I
have a piece titled ‘Vox Populi: The Recorded Voice in Twentieth-Century
British History’ in the latest issue of the journal Twentieth-Century British
History. It’s subscription-only but here is a little snippet:

Stanley
Ellis, the principal fieldworker for Harold Orton’s Survey of English Dialects
at Leeds University, was energised by the invention of the portable tape
recorder. His institution had a long history of recording voices: F.W. Moorman,
soon after his appointment as Professor of English in 1912, persuaded the
university to buy a primitive wax-cylinder dictaphone and he would ride on a
bicycle, his dictaphone strapped to it, to take field recordings of local
dialect in Yorkshire villages. In 1928 Orton himself had initiated a survey of
Northumbrian dialects and he aimed to continue this during and after the war at
Leeds but petrol rationing, in place until 1950, severely hindered field
collection.

In 1952, no longer
hindered by petrol shortages, Ellis began riding round Britain in a BSA motorcycle
and sidecar loaded with his new Simon Mark I portable recorder and packets of
Ringtons tea used to persuade village postmistresses to put him in touch with
the elderly agricultural workers whose dialect would be best preserved. After
Ellis’s marriage in spring 1953 the University supplied him with a caravan and
a better tape recorder designed by a former BBC engineer, which also had a
battery and converter. Ellis lived with his wife and, later, their first child
on the road for the next five years, giving rise to the compellingly titled
scholarly article, ‘Dialect-Hunting by Caravan’. At first this caravan was
pulled by a 1936 Vauxhall 14hp car but this aged vehicle could not carry its
load up steep hills, so fieldwork was initially confined to flat Lincolnshire -
until in 1954, the university supplied a Land Rover and Ellis began covering
the whole country from the home counties to the Scottish borders. Maurice
Varney, who studied dialectology at Leeds from 1955 to 1959, wrote later that
‘when Stanley’s land rover and caravan pulled up at the English Department
after another expedition, we all trembled as if awaiting the arrival of a great
explorer like Shackleton or Burton’. This being the period of My Fair Lady’s
long run in the West End (1958-63), Ellis’s ability to place a regional accent
to within a couple of miles led to newspapers describing him as ‘a real-life
Professor Higgins’.

Saturday, 19 July 2014

On the other side of the water you get much more of a
sense of Liverpool as a maritime city. During a recent trip to New Brighton to
see the Perch Rock lighthouse, I saw a massive container ship, crammed full of
those familiar multi-coloured metal boxes, being guided slowly into the
Seaforth docks by two tugboats. According to Colin Davies, in his book Prefab, the rise of the shipping
container as sustaining force of the modern world is down to one man: Malcolm
McClean, an American trucking entrepreneur who, in the 1950s, persuaded port
authorities and shipping companies ‘to stop gazing into the cavernous holds of
ships and turn attention instead to the long, narrow forms of the lorries,
trains and barges that carried the goods to and from the port’. McClean’s achievement was to ensure the global dominance of the ISI (International
Standards Organisation) shipping container: a twenty-feet by eight-feet by
eight-feet stackable steel box which meant that the goods did not need to be
handled when transferring between different forms of transport like a ship and
a lorry. Shipping containers throughout the world are now all the same shape
and size although there are different kinds for different cargoes:
side-opening, end-opening, open-topped and air-conditioned ‘reefers’. A
container can even be turned into a site office by adding a door and a couple
of windows.

The view from New Brighton inspired me to read Horatio
Clare’s excellent Down to the Sea in
Ships, about his journey round the world on two container ships. The title
is of course from Psalm 107: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships and do business in
great waters, they see the workings of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.’ This
is what Clare also discovers,‘a parallel world which sustains
the one we inhabit’.The sailors on container ships, many of them Filipinos
paid shamefully less than the rest of the crew, are ignorant of what is in the
containers because otherwise the shipping companies think they will be tempted
to steal the contents. But ‘informed guesswork suggests we will have flashy
cars in some of the boxes - the kind no one wants to risk on a car carrier -
and scrap metals for China’s hungry markets, and paper and plastic waste for
recycling or disposal.’

At the end of
his journey Clare says he felt like the Ancient Mariner, wanting to stoppeth
one in three and say ‘listen, there is a ship at sea tonight, and this is who
is on board, and this is what their lives are like, and without them none of
this world you call normal would exist’. He, meanwhile, ‘will always be able to
hear the moans and whistles of her stairwell, her ghost music, the muted and
ceaseless piano of her theme tune, and the enduring, resisting stoicism of the
men who sing and hum her on.’

Saturday, 31 May 2014

For
the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to mark students’ work in my office accompanied
by the ambient noise of drilling and banging in the basement. God knows what
the builders are doing down there, but the walls in my room have actually vibrated
with their efforts. The odd thing is that I seem to be the only one bothered by the
din. It has made me wonder about the subjectivity of noise, the way that
certain sounds that some of us simply filter out can drive the rest of us to
distraction.

I
have just read Michael King’s biography of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame,
and am struck by how much the story of her life was a gradual retreat from extraneous
noise. In her solitary bedsit in London in the
1950s, she tried to build a soundproof booth in the centre of the room, draped
with towels and blankets, to keep out the noise of her landlady’s baby and a
booming TV set. Back in New Zealand, she moved house any number of times simply
to get away from the noise of motorcycles or barking dogs. On the suburban
sounds of lawnmowers and do-it-yourself carpenters she wrote:

‘They are all an invasion of privacy.
You wouldn’t let a stranger enter your house without knocking, so why let his
noise come in unwanted? Chekhov made the same complaint, and in some meagre way
I can compare myself to him. Silence and solitude are the only ways to get on
with my work. If you want to write you must get on with it. There’s no point in
socialising. When I was younger and leading a sort of hippie existence in London
I used to go to the cafés and see all the young people who said they wanted to
write. But if they had really wanted to write they wouldn’t have been there,
would they? They’d have been in a quiet room getting on with it.’

According
to Michael Foley in his book Embracing
the Ordinary, Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust spent most of their only
meeting with each other moaning about how much they were distracted by other
people’s noise. Proust recommended that Bergson try Quiès ear plugs. ‘I have
found that people are curiously insensitive to the nuisances they inflict on
other people,’ the Orcardian poet George Mackay Brown wrote in his
autobiography. ‘The air is full of noises; sound is thought to be a natural and
acceptable background in the twentieth century. Silence is the thing to be
dreaded.’ Brown was so sensitive to noise that, during a stay at a TB
sanatorium, he grabbed his roommate’s transistor radio in a fit of rage and
smashed it against the wall.

I don’t want to become like these
people, aural versions of the fairy-tale princess distracted by the tiny pea
under dozens of mattresses. I don’t have the talent to justify their
neuroticism. But sometimes I can’t help agreeing with Jules Laforgue who wrote
that ‘the
modern world has embarked on a conspiracy to establish that silence does not
exist’.

Mundane
quote for the day: ‘Have you noticed that the BBC keeps its silliest
programmes, and its jokiest announcers, for those times in the morning and
evening when people are on their way to and from work. It’s very significant.
Why should the BBC choose those times to cover the land in a pall of fatuity?
What is it about work that we have to be hurried to and from it by drivelling
idiots?’ Alan Bennett, Getting On

Saturday, 24 May 2014

This
is the bench at work where I sit and have my lunch if the weather allows it. Our
building, which used to be a convent, backs on to a couple of acres of garden where
the nuns used to tend their allotments. Here I sit and smell the mown grass and
watch the trees coming into leaf while I wonder how many people before me have
unwrapped a forlorn-looking sandwich from its tin-foil wrapper and ruminated on
a bar of fruit and nut. The garden is dotted with benches, many of them with
plaques dedicated to former members of staff or students who have died. Even
without these associations, there is something melancholy about a park bench,
that unchanging design which has accommodated so many nameless human behinds.

The
artist Tom Phillips has produced a series of paintings which enlarge and subtly
modify postcards incorporating municipal park benches. The first and best known
of these is Benches (1971), the material for which has been reworked and
adapted in a number of other works including Ma Vlast (1972) and The Flower
Before the Bench (1973-74). Benches interlaces a number of apparently
insignificant details from similar postcards of people sitting or strolling in
parks in Battersea, Harrogate, Bournemouth and Brighton.

The
main focus of the painting is the people who inhabit the parks, and who are
often at the margins of the original postcards but are placed in the centre of
Phillips’s work. Unlike the more posed shots of family albums, these postcards
bring unsuspecting strangers together, forcing them into a relationship with
each other at a moment frozen in time for public consumption. As the French
cultural theorist Maurice Blanchot writes, one of the reasons the everyday
evades analysis or perception is that it is ‘without a subject,’ so that when
we live the everyday ‘it is anyone, anyone whatsoever, who does so’. The
subjectlessness of these postcards gives a sense of both commonality and
isolation: of a civic life suggested by benches, paths, well-kept lawns and
other public amenities, but also of countless isolated, anonymous and
interchangeable selves moving within it, what de Michel de Certeau calls that ‘multitude
of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river
of the streets’.

Phillips
notes elsewhere that postcard images tend to ‘deceitfully inhabit their own
eternal summer’ and, once the tinting process has done its worst, have a much
higher proportion than in real life of brightly-coloured clothes and cars with
the shiny newness of die-cast models. In the postcards used in Benches, though,
this artificial sunniness comes up against the blandness and uniformity of the
public parks, their carefully arranged flower beds, neatly trimmed foliage and
ubiquitous concrete. We see not an idealised spectacle but a random moment of daily
life, in which the faceless individuals in the postcards could easily be
replaced by other people. Reminding us that the people pictured in postcards
are sometimes dead by the time the card is purchased, Phillips describes Benches
as ‘a plea against dying’ and includes a stencilled quote at the bottom of the
painting from Isaiah 40: ‘All Flesh is as Grass … the Grass Withereth.’

Mundane quote for the
day: ‘There
it was, your life of everyday, with its duties and its meals, its small
comforts and its upholstery, and wordy goings on; with its fragile and often
unexpressed affinities, homely jests and intrusion of the infinite.’ - Pamela
Bright, The Day’s End (1959), p. 183

The lecture is
free and anyone can come. It’s called ‘What BBC2 taught me about television’
and will be followed by a screening of the final episode of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, first shown on BBC2 in
1969.

I was on BBC
Radio Wales talking about the anniversary of the launch of BBC2 on 20 April. It’s here about 40
minutes in I think:

Saturday, 19 April 2014

When I grew up, I wanted to be a lighthouse
keeper. Just like Moominpappa
in Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, my ambition was to live on the loneliest
lighthouse on the remotest skerry farthest from
land. It didn’t end well for Moominpappa, the island he and the other Moomins settled on being
barren and desolate, inhabited only by a silent fisherman who turned out to be
the ex-lighthouse keeper driven mad by loneliness. It didn’t put me off.

I
have since met many of my compatriots who had or still have the same dream, for
there is something about lighthouses that seems to speak to our islanded souls.
Now, to celebrate the quincentenary of Trinity House, the organisation
responsible for the lighthouses of England and Wales, an exhibition is opening
at the National Maritime Museum. “Guiding Lights” will display intricate models
of lighthouses and lighthouse keepers’ personal effects. It is hard to imagine
a similarly pulse-quickening exhibition about air traffic controllers or road
safety officers, although our lives are similarly in their hands.

“I
meant nothing by the lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf wrote of its role in her most
celebrated novel, “but I trusted that people would make it the deposit for
their own emotions.” Lighthouses, Woolf realised, are endlessly suggestive
signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each
other. Countless British artists, from John Constable to Eric Ravilious, have
made them the focus of their paintings, which can’t simply be to do with their
pleasingly vertical contrast with the horizon.

I
suspect that lighthouses appeal especially to introverts like me, who need to
make strategic withdrawals from the social world but also want to retain some
basic link with humanity. A beam sweeping the horizon for the benefit of ships passing
in the night is just that kind of minimal human connection. “Nothing must be allowed to silence our voices … We must call
out to one another,” wrote Janet Frame, a shy New Zealand writer also fascinated
by lighthouses, “across seas and deserts flashing words instead of mirrors and
lights.”

I finally cured my lighthouse fantasy by reading
Tony Parker’s Lighthouse, his oral history of the lighthouse keepers. Looking
after a light – no keeper ever called it a lighthouse - was, I learned, a tedious
job, with little to do but linger over meals and make ships in bottles. The
clincher was reading about the keeper who was so lonely that in the middle of
the night he switched on the transmitter and listened to the ships radioing
each other, just to hear some other human voices. The tower lights, the
ones that rise impossibly out of the sea and carry the most romantic connotations
for landlubberly ignoramuses like me, were the most dreaded by the keepers. Without even a bit of rock to walk around on and escape from your housemates,
they were
the lighthouse-keeping equivalent of being posted to Siberia.

In
any case, I was well out of it because lighthouse keeping was not a job with
prospects. The lighthouses began to be automated in the 1970s and the last
keeper left the last occupied lighthouse in 1998. Now, in an age of radar and
computerised navigation systems, working lighthouses are an endangered species.
Their haunting fog signals are being switched off. Their black and red painted
stripes, meant to stand out against the land and sky, are being left to peel
off without being retouched. And many lighthouses are being decommissioned,
turned into holiday cottages or expensively renovated homes.

No doubt satnav will now
do the job just as well, but it will be a shame when the last lighthouse turns
off its light. In an age when we have to justify public projects with reference
to the consumerist language of stakeholders and end users, lighthouses still
feel like an uncomplicated social good that belongs to us all. They are the concrete
symbol of our common humanity, of the fact that people we may never meet – whom
we may do no more than flash our lights at in the dark - are also our concern.

Saturday, 12 April 2014

Why do ‘high achievers’ (not a phrase I care for) so often
feel like failures? ‘We share our lives with the people we have failed to be,’
writes Adam Phillips in his book Missing
Out. ‘Once the next life - the better life, the fuller life - has to be in
this one we have a considerable task on our hands. Now someone is asking us not
only to survive but to flourish, not simply or solely to be good but to make
the most of our lives … Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was
displaced by the promise of more life - the promise, as we say, of getting more
out of life - the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legimated
by nothing more than the desire to live it.’

In the modern university, as in
most market-led public services, failure is no longer considered an option.
Everything must be satisficing, which means that much is mediocre - neither a ruinous
failure nor a spectacular success. Google, by contrast, has a sub-division,
Google [x], which it describes as a ‘moonshot factory’, where its engineers
collaborate on audacious ideas. Its head is reported on the BBC news website as
saying: ‘You must reward people for failing … If not, they won’t take risks and
make breakthroughs. If you don’t reward failure, people will hang on to a
doomed idea for fear of the consequences. That wastes time and saps an
organisation’s spirit.’

I would love to set up a
moonshot factory in a modern university that rewarded failure. For surely any creative
activity worth doing contains within it the possibility, perhaps even the
likelihood, of failure. Most conversations,
at least the ones I seem to be involved with, are failed attempts at
communication.Teaching is mostly about failure, because it is based on
conversation and words are always liable to fall on stony ground. Reading is
about failure, because most of what we read we forget, and quite a lot of it is
not as interesting as we thought it would be. Writing is about failure because,
even if we manage to finish something and send it out into the world, we will
mostly come up against a wall of indifference made of people who have other
things on their mind and other things to read and write. ‘Any kind of effort
to make linkage via signs is a gamble,’ writes the philosopher John Durham
Peters in his book Speaking into the Air.
‘To the question, How can we really know we have communicated? there is no
ultimate answer besides a pragmatic one that our subsequent actions seem to act
in some kind of concert.’In other words, you just keep throwing enough mud at the wall until some
of it sticks. Maybe you only have to succeed once,
or at least to fail less catastrophically. As
Samuel Beckett put it in Worstward Ho:
‘Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.’

Mundane
quote for the day: ‘If your daily life seems poor do not blame it; blame yourself,
tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the
creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.’ - Rainer Maria
Rilke

Sunday, 30 March 2014

'For
the great revolution of Mr Willett’s summer time had taken place since Peter
Walsh’s last visit to England. The prolonged evening was new to him. It was
inspiriting, rather. For as the young people went by with their despatch-boxes,
awfully glad to be free, proud too, dumbly, of stepping this famous payment,
joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if you like, but all the same rapture, flushed
their faces. They dressed well too; pink stockings; pretty shoes. They would
now have two hours at the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the
yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid -
they looked as if dipped in sea-water - the foliage of a submerged city.' - Virginia Woolf, Mrs
Dalloway

Saturday, 29 March 2014

I
liked what John Banville said to Claudia Winkleman on Radio 2 last night about
the sentence, so I went on to iPlayer and transcribed it:

‘I
work in the sentence. The sentence is the essence of our humanity. It’s our
greatest invention and I love working in it. It’s a great privilege that I make
some sort of a living from every day dabbling in this essential piece of our
humanness. Yes, I love a good sentence. I spend a great deal of time trying to
get them right.’

I have a piece on the history of BBC2, which is 50 years old next month, in the latest issue of BBC History Magazine. It's not available online but here is a brief snippet:The BBC's Director of Television Kenneth Adam
announced that the new channel called on the viewer ‘occasionally to stretch
himself a little further’ and ‘to push back the horizon a little’. But
according to a poll conducted in June 1964, viewers were not keen on having
their horizons pushed back. Nearly half of those who had seen BBC2 thought its
programmes worse than those on ITV and BBC1. Among BBC2’s regular viewers there
were twice as many men as women - probably, said the polling company, ‘due only
to male intellectual curiosity’.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘A
television aerial was poised from the roof, like a new kind of flag deprived of
its drapery either because the color and motto were undecided or because the
object of loyalty was vanished or dead or had never existed.’ Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind

Sunday, 2 March 2014

There is a nice tweet doing the rounds at the moment - I can't find it so don't know who tweeted it first - that says something like: 'In academia everyone is smart. So distinguish yourself by being kind.'

A lovely thought.

And, luckily, my kindness has been rated 4* and internationally significant by internal and external reviewers.

The artist and writer Joanne Lee kindly sent me the
latest offering from her own Pam Flett Press, ‘Gumming up the works’. It begins
as a meditation on those blobs of chewing gum that dot across urban pavements.
I learn that the common Lecanora
muralis has the vernacular name ‘chewing gum lichen’ because it is ‘a dead
ringer for discs of trodden gum’. And that in 2012, the French state-owned rail
company SNCF ‘commissioned a huge sculpture of green gum, around which
passengers had to navigate to access the entrance of Marseille railway station.
It formed part of a campaign titled Il
n’y a pas de petites incivilities that sought to deal with a variety of
antisocial or aggressive behaviours, including the littering of gum and
discarded cigarettes.’

Like its predecessors, though, Gumming Up the Works is also a series of riffs on Lee’s extensive
reading from Jarvis Cocker to Carlo Ginzburg. I felt some sympathy with this
little lament halfway through:

‘I fail to achieve objectivity: my projects are way
too personal and autobiographical for peer-reviewed publication, but too
cluttered with footnotes and academic debate to find a place in a publisher’s
non-fiction lists. My investigations are deficient in a formal academic
methodology and instead oscillate between a series of temporary critical
alliances, chance encounters, and obsessive fandom … I easily forget the bigger
picture, instead getting sidetracked in juicy digressions, fixated upon all
kinds of minutiae or enjoying the jewel-like quotations I’ve mined from unpromising
sources.’

In fact, what I was sent is really a companion
volume of footnotes to a spoken word recording which you can listen to here:

Monday, 24 February 2014

According
to Anna Massey’s memoir, Telling Some Tales,
it was a bit easier to pass your driving test in 1955. ‘My examiner was a
nervous man who asked me if I knew that I’d driven through a red light,’ Massey
writes. ‘I told him I thought it was green, and he said “Fair enough,” and
passed me.’ (p. 54)

Sunday, 16 February 2014

I
enjoyed Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life,
a series of case studies culled from his quarter of a century working as a
psychoanalyst. They are like surreal short stories that end with insights and
aphorisms, a bit like Raymond Carver crossed with Adam Phillips. In one
chapter, ‘How paranoia can relieve suffering and prevent a catastrophe’, Grosz
writes:

‘Paranoid
fantasies are a response to the feeling that we are being treated with
indifference … they protect us from a more disastrous emotional state – namely,
the feeling that no one is concerned about us, that no one cares. The thought
“so-and-so has betrayed me” protects us from the more painful thought “no one
thinks about me” … It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to
feel forgotten … paranoid fantasies are often a response to the world’s
disregard.’

For
Grosz, what we need most of all – far more than limitless praise or love – is
the sense of being attended to, of being noticed, listened to and worried
about.

I’m
writing a book about shyness, and it occurred to me after reading this that shy
people might be more inclined to paranoia, because they find it harder to make
an impression on the world, and are more likely to feel unnoticed, overlooked,
invisible. But I don’t think I have ever suffered from paranoia. Instead, I
have what seems to me to be – although I suppose I would say this, wouldn’t I? – an entirely rational sense of my own
insignificance.

Friday, 14 February 2014

I’m not really a fan of Valentine’s
Day, but it did make me think of this. In June 1948, Alan Turing and a small
research team at Manchester University persuaded a stored-program computer to
work for the first time. Turing became a proselytiser for artificial
intelligence, believing that this ‘mechanical brain’ would one day be able to
compete on equal terms with a human brain - to the extent that it would be able
write sonnets as well as Shakespeare, although he conceded that the comparison
was ‘a little unfair’ because a sonnet written by a machine would be better
appreciated by another machine. Using the
1951 model of the Manchester computer, nicknamed the Blue Pig, Turing and his
colleague Christopher Strachey created a programme (using algorithms for building
sentences and synonyms for love from Roget’s Thesaurus) that could produce love
letters, such as:

Sunday, 9 February 2014

I’m
not sure why, but in a bored moment I went on Amazon to track all my past
orders, to see if it could tell me something about what I’ve actually been
doing for the last 15 years of my life. I discovered that the first book I
bought on Amazon was on 25 March 1999: Cynthia Ozick’s Fame and Folly. That was back in the days when the internet was
steam-powered and you had to dial it up and it tutted for a bit and then responded
if it felt like it. I bought 13 items in 1999 and things carried on at that
manageable pace for the next few years. As late as 2006, I only put in 11
orders. I must have still been two-timing Amazon with bookshops, an online-shopping
commitment-phobe. I kidded myself that I was a recreational user, that I could
kick the habit any time I wanted. But then things got out of control. I started
buying birthday and Christmas presents and non-books, weird things like
earplugs and hot water bottles. Perhaps the tipping point came when I bought my
first big ticket item, an iPod, on 20 January 2007. There was no going back
from there. Last year I put in 87 orders – and they often included multiple
items. Yes, I am the reason your indie bookshop closed down. It’s my fault that
low-paid workers have to walk 20 miles a day in vast warehouses to fetch my
orders while computers track their every move. I claim to be angry about big companies
employing vast teams of accountants to dodge corporation tax – but as it turns
out, I’m not.

It’s
an evocative and slightly melancholy list. By clicking through the years I can
see my nephew and niece growing up: Doctor Who Sonic Screwdrivers and Harry
Potter Interactive Wands give way to Nintendo Wii games and One Direction
pencil cases. I can see all my brief passions and interests flame up and then fizzle
out. I note that I have bought five USB sticks, as they progressively get lost
or they become bent and decrepit. Every single order I put in, in some small
way, was an investment in the future. I must have thought on some level that it
would make me more knowledgeable, more productive, more interesting to others,
happier.

Last
Thursday, I went to Liverpool’s Bluecoat Arts Centre to see Paul Farley and
Michael Symmons Roberts talk about their book Edgelands. I was pleased to hear they
actually wrote the book together in motorway service stations – something it has
in common with the Meg and Mog books, which were composed by Helen Nicoll and
her illustrator, Jan Pienkowski, at Membury Services on the M4. Their talk
formed part of a series of events tied up with Soft Estate, an exhibition of
the work of Edward Chell and other artists who are interested in motorways, the
areas around them and other types of edgeland.

Soft
Estate is the Highways Agency term for the landscape around motorways and trunk
roads which offers a refuge for wildlife. As long ago as
the late 1960s, conservationists began to realise that the motorway verges
could serve as nature reserves, particularly in the arable south where pasture
was disappearing rapidly. When the M1 was finished in 1967, the conservationist
Michael Way coordinated a botanical survey of the entire roadside verge between
Hendon and Leeds and discovered that, just like the railways, the motorways
were eco-havens. Pollen and seeds hitched a ride on car bumpers or blew along
the wind tunnels created by moving traffic and roadside cuttings. In 1974 the
nature writer Richard Mabey – who contributes an essay to the Soft Estate book
- calculated that there were nearly half a million acres of roadside verge in
Britain, an area of land bigger than the statutory nature reserves. By now the
UK had joined the Common Market and prairie farming was about to grow fat on
European subsidies and the Common Agricultural Policy – so more hedgerows
vanished and nature again retreated to the roadside verges.

In
fact, the roadside verge is really the modern equivalent of the hedgerow –
although it has yet to acquire its Edmund Blunden, the poet and conservationist
who in 1935 misquoted King Lear’s fool to foretell that ‘when there are no more
English hedges, and the expedient of barbed wire has carried the day
everywhere, “There shall the realm of Albion / Be brought to great confusion.”’
We normally think of verges as the motoring equivalent of a
screensaver, an endless green sward interrupted by the occasional abandoned tyre or
stray plastic bag. Yet as Mabey showed, it was part of an ‘unofficial
countryside’ that was valuable almost because it was so unnoticed and unloved.
The roadside was deceptively diverse, cutting through every type of landscape
and geology, and including not only the grass embankments but also the balancing
ponds and settling pools needed to drain the carriageway of rainwater, which
often attracted wildlife. It was the dogged, unlovely nature of the roadside -
from the rare fungi and algae that thrived in the drip-zone under crash
barriers to the wild flowers that flourished on the poor-quality soil of the
verge – that made it ecologically important.

Edward
sent me a copy of the book of the exhibition and there are some beautiful-looking
things in it, including his own paintings of roadside verge plants made with
road dust, and some lovely oil-on-shellac-on-linen paintings of motorway
service stations. I’m still hoping to get along to the exhibition, which has a
couple of weeks left to run. Details are here:

Saturday, 11 January 2014

Writing in the 1950s, the
French cultural critic Roland Barthes argued that cars were “almost the exact
equivalent of Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era,
conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in
usage by a whole population which appropriates them purely as a magical
object”. Those of us who still congregate for the Top Gear liturgy on irregular
Sundays have noticed that church attendance has dwindled recently, but the car remains
an object that invites worship. As well as being loaded with the symbolic
baggage of money, status and sexual competitiveness, it is a pretext for grown
men (and occasionally women) to engage in the unembarrassed sharing of esoteric
knowledge and aesthetic delight. And yet like other religions, car worship increasingly
provokes anger and resentment from non-believers. In his epic anti-car poem
Autogeddon, Heathcote Williams described streets as “open sewers of the car
cult”. At Reclaim the Streets events in the 1990s, protestors carried mock road
signs with the slogans “Fuck The Car” and “Cars Come Too Fast”. One way or
another, people get worked up about cars.

The car is thus an object ripe
for cultural and historical analysis, and here are two books that attempt this
in very different ways. Steven Parissien’s The Life of the Automobile is a truly
global history of the motor car, from Benz to biofuels. It begins in earnest in
1891 with the French engineer Émile Levassor effectively inventing the modern
automobile by moving the engine to the front and adding a front-mounted
radiator, crankshaft, clutch pedal and gearstick. The book reminds us that Henry
Ford created not only the mass market in automobiles but also the market in car
accessories, for his Model T was so lacking in refinements that the Sears,
Roebuck catalogue included over 5000 items that could be attached to it. It was
Alfred P. Sloan, the President of General Motors, who introduced the notion of
planned obsolescence and of gradually trading up from entry-level Chevrolet to top-of-the-range
Cadillac. Parissien takes us through the golden age of the car in the 1950s and
1960s, when models like the Citroën DS, the 1959 Cadillac, the E-Type Jaguar
and James Bond’s beloved Aston Martin DB5 combined beauty and functionality. Then,
as the car came to be pilloried for causing congestion and pollution, the
automobile industry responded by forging new markets in southern Asia and China
and experimenting with alternative fuels and hybrids that mostly sought to eke
out the diminishing reserves of oil. But it also responded with the single-fingered
salute that is the gas-guzzling SUV, the global market for which continues to
grow, unbowed by either austerity or ecopolitics.

Parissien’s is mostly a
work of synthesis, culled from secondary sources, but some overarching themes
present themselves. You discover how much the car relied on world wars as mothers
of technological invention and opportunities for global branding. The Rolls-Royce
Silver Ghost, for instance, established itself as the epitome of luxury in the First
World War when it was used to chauffeur generals to the front, and T.E. Lawrence
granted it perfect product placement in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, describing it as
“more valuable than rubies”. During the Second World War, the first Volkswagen
Beetles were designed with a high clearance so they could be deployed on the
Russian front. Mainly an account of the car industry, Parissien’s book offers
some interesting sidelights in social history. We learn that Vermont was a
remote backwater until its Bureau of Publicity began marketing the state to pioneer
motorists for leaf-peeping in the fall and skiing in winter, and that in 1931
Barbara Cartland organised a race for MG Midgets at Brooklands to demonstrate the
skilfulness of women drivers.

Parissien’s heroes are
clearly the resourceful and lateral-thinking engineers, the usually unknown
artists who design these magical objects. A refreshing aspect of his book is
that, while he gives the high-end models their due, he seems equally charmed by
serviceable cars like Flaminio Bertoni’s Citroën 2CV, an “umbrella on four
wheels” launched in 1948 for France’s still largely rural population and designed
to be driven by a clog-wearing peasant across a ploughed field without breaking
the eggs on the back seat. Not all the industry’s efforts at make-do-and-mend were
so dependable and lovable. Parissien devotes much space to the tragic outcomes of
the British Leyland assembly line, like the Morris Marina, a “skip on wheels”
which arrived at showrooms with the paintwork already stippled with rust, and
the Austin Allegro, whose pointlessly futuristic square steering wheel did not prevent
it being nicknamed “the Flying Pig”. At least neither were as bad as the East
German Trabant, made from Duroplast, an unrecyclable phenolic resin
strengthened by Soviet cotton wool waste and compressed brown paper, which released
noxious fumes that made its assembly-line workers ill and killed quite a few of
them.

The Life of the Automobile leaves
you with the sense that the car is both an extraordinarily sophisticated object
– made from tens of thousands of component parts, capable of delivering its
occupants long distances in extreme comfort, and now fitted with stop-start
engines, voice-activated controls, automatic parking systems and radar
technology to read road markings – and a surprisingly primitive one. For its
basic technology, the internal combustion engine, is a nineteenth-century
invention and it remains, as the Japanese say, “a third-class machine”, needing
a highly-skilled human to work it properly. Parissien sees the automobile’s
contradictions already encapsulated near the start of its life in the
personality of Henry Ford - “daringly innovative, yet at the same time
intrinsically conservative; brashly aggressive, yet apprehensive and hesitant;
socially progressive, yet politically reactionary”.

Mark Wallington’s The Auto
Biography is more personal and idiosyncratic, his idea being to tell the story
of the last 60 years of British motoring through his own encounters with cars. The
book begins in 1953 with his father’s purchase of a Ford Popular, a “biscuit
tin on wheels” which can only run to a single windscreen wiper, to bring his
son back from the maternity ward. Wallington’s narrative arc runs from the
excitements of the early motorway age to the disenchantments of the present,
symbolised by his father turning road protestor when a bypass is built at the
back of his house. The book ends bathetically with the author’s purchase of a
charcoal-grey Ford Focus, “a car that specializes in not being noticed”, although
“perhaps it’s got a little more grey over the last two years”.

This convivial book is hard
to dislike and there are some nice vignettes. Wallington’s father, who plans
journeys along the virgin motorways of the 1950s and 1960s with the same meticulousness
he brought to his role as an RAF navigator in the war, warms his car’s spark
plugs in the oven on winter mornings, so that breakfast smells are “offset by
the piquant aroma of engine oil”. In her first trip on the M6, his mother buys
a postcard of it at a service station to send to her hairdresser. During the suffocating
summer of 1976, as long queues of hitchhikers form at Staples Corner at the
foot of the M1, the asphalt melts and “you could peel it off the side of the
roads”.

But as these details
suggest, this book does not veer wildly from the main routes, presenting us
with a series of stock figures from Tufty the road safety squirrel to Swampy
the tunnelling road protestor. It has that slight air of condescension you sometimes
find in popular histories of the recent past, in which our immediate ancestors
are seen as naïve or quaint for getting excited about phenomena like the
motorway service station or the Gravelly Hill Interchange that, from our more knowing
and enlightened present, are revealed as quite mundane.

Like modern cars, both
these books rumble along nicely but seem largely cocooned in their own comforting
microenvironment, cut off from the world beyond the dashboard. Neither of them seem
much concerned with what the excitements, passions and anxieties generated by the
car tell us about ourselves or the society we have become. The car still awaits
a social and cultural history that would explore how this miraculous and
mundane object, what J.G. Ballard called this “huge metallized dream”, has come
to penetrate so deeply into the routines and reveries of our waking lives.

Sunday, 5 January 2014

After writing that post about ice
skating, I came across this idea of the ice-rink as the quintessence of
existential pointlessness in Tove Jansson’s just-reissued Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir:

‘I know what it is that’s the worst
thing of all. It’s the skating-rink. I have a six-sided skating badge sewn to
my jumper. The key I use to tighten my skates is on a shoelace round my neck.
When you go down onto the ice, the skating-rink looks like a little bracelet of
light far out in the darkness … Hundreds of shadowy figures skate round and
round, all in the same direction, resolutely and pointlessly, and two freezing
old men sit playing in the middle under a tarpaulin … Everybody just skates
faster, strange shadows making scrunching and squeaking noises as they pass … The
skating rink was the isle of sorrow.’

And here is some more material for
that history of student life I’m never going to write. I found this in
Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Century and
Seven More Years, the first part of his autobiography, in which he describes
his abortive encounter with the Law Tripos at Cambridge University in the early
1900s:

‘Dutifully I attended droning
lectures, desperately scribbling fragments of what I overheard and seldom
understanding what my notes were about when I perused them in private.
Note-taking seemed to be physical rather than mental exercise … Toiling at my
text-books, I discovered again and again that I had turned over two pages at
once without noticing anything wrong.’

Saturday, 4 January 2014

I
heard a bit of Arnold Bennett’s ‘How to Live on 24 Hours a Day’ on Radio 4’s ‘Thought
for the Day’ and it seemed appropriate for the start of the year and for a blog
which is, among other things, about the everyday. So I dug it out:

‘The
supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when
one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically
filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of
your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly
singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity
itself!

For
remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either
more or less than you receive.

Talk
about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of
wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an
extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious
commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you.
No mysterious power will say:—“This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not
deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than
consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot
draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing
moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the
next hour; it is kept for you.

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog